Pop Angst

07.29.133:18 PM ET

Warhol Goes C.S.I. on Munch

The Daily Pic: Andy felt the link between the Norwegian and his victims.

Another of Warhol’s silkscreen riffs on Edvard Munch’s prints, from the show that closed yesterday at Scandinavia House in New York.It was Warhol’s choice to combine the femme-fatale “Madonna" image with Munch’s self-portrait. The pairing gets at a couple of truths. First, that the self-created image of Munch as tortured artist is inseparable from the (impeccably) tortured art he produced – Warhol knowing more than most about such acts of artistic self-creation. Second, that a tortured woman is never without her torturer. (It’s easy to imagine this doubling as forensic: the crime-scene image of a rape victim paired with a mug shot of her rapist.) Again, Warhol, the consumate voyeur of others’ sexual politics, knew all about such ties.